Blind Light...

Me and the Missus ended our week of culture by going to see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward – and it's brilliant. Utterly compelling.

Gormley is the man who created the Angel Of The North and most recently his work entitled Event Horizon can be seen dotted around the London skyline along either side of the Thames. This 'free art' takes the form of bronze casts of Gormley's body standing on top of various London buildings and the idea is that it makes people look up and interact with their environment more.

Two of his bronze body casts are also positioned on opposite sides of the pavement on Waterlooo Bridge and I happened to be cycling over the bridge when workmen were installing them. I was a bit thrown as I thought somebody was trying to steal them rather than install them but now they've become one of the pleasures of my ride home.

The Hayward exhibition features various body casts and installations but the eponymous Blind Light is the work that steals the show.

It's essentially a brilliantly lit glass room filled with dry steam but the steam is so dense that visibility ends at about 50cm so you have to very carefully negotiate your way around the room as well as the other people in it. It sounds very unnerving but it's actually great fun and it's one of the rare times I've been in an art exhibition where people are actually having a fun experience and talking and laughing about it.

The other major massive work at the exhibition is called Space Station and it's 27 tonnes of different-sized metal boxes with square holes punched through them. They're all welded together and the whole piece looks as though it's precariously balanced on its edge, but as you look through the holes and the spaces inbetween it's a bit like an industrial children's climbing frame where you actually want to physically clamber through as well as look at the spaces inbetween the boxes.

Allotment II is also a large piece comprised of 300 rectangular block sculptures representeing the height, width and size of the 300 volunteers who took part in the 'modelling' process. These individual pieces fill a huge room and it's like a maze of anonymous people, until you start walking through them and working out their dimensions and how they differ from the other pieces. It's like blank puzzle where you give the individual bits meaning but only by comparing them to the other bits.

Gormley's work is about the relationship between the body and the spaces it inhabits (or so it says in the Hayward brochure) and I fully get that after seeing this exhibition. It's clever without being smug and interesting without being academically alienating.

Artists I like, whether they’re poets, writers, playwrights or painters, either explain the world to me in a way I fundamentally connect with or they make me look at the world in a slightly different way.

Gormley does the latter for me and I'm now a convert to his work.